Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food

Europe doesn't have a water problem. The rain still falls; we've just spent a few hundred years engineering it off the land as fast as we can, which James Barrett likens to hauling your garden clippings to the dump only to drive back in spring and buy compost.
James is a regenerative hydrology consultant, founder of Decent Water Company and lead regenerative designer for Ten Lives Festival in Portugal — where 150 people spent their mornings digging rock-lined "smiles" into a semi-arid, 70-hectare site that sees barely 400mm of rain a year. Sitting between two almond trees, he explains why he favours many small, low-risk interventions over one big dam, how those rock linings passively harvest daily fog and condensation much like the fog nets of Chile, and why transpiring trees hand a landscape a longer growing season and a few degrees of cooling. He also shows how LiDAR and AI let him read 70 hectares from a laptop, finding where water wants to pool before he lifts a shovel.
This is a practical field lesson in keeping water higher in the landscape — and in why where you choose to dig decides whether soil, ecosystems and the economics all start to regenerate together.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
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The Midwest: 140 million acres of corn and soybeans, rural economies slowly dying, a system with no real long-term future in terms of soil or human health. It's also where roughly 25% of farmland could flip the entire region toward regeneration—but only if you coordinate capital the right way.
Ivana Gazibara, Director of Systemic Investment Programmes at the TransCap Initiative, spent two years mapping the intervention points needed to drive systemic change across the agricultural heartland. She uncovered something unexpected: money isn't the problem. Coordination is. Venture capital, public funders, and philanthropists all allocate capital into regenerative agriculture—but almost never in the same room together, much less actively collaborating. The result? Capital that's supposed to be systemic lands as scattered bets.
The solution: the Regenerative Agriculture Capital Orchestrator (RACO), a blueprint for deploying $1.4 billion in catalytic capital to attract $7.5 billion more, organized around four pillars—system intelligence platform, capital matchmaking, catalytic finance, and field building. This is systems change made concrete: what it costs per acre, how to move money at scale, what happens when you stop treating regeneration as a one-off problem and start treating it as a reshaping of incentives across lending, insurance, and investment. Because you can't finance a transition you haven't mapped, and you can't scale a transition money isn't deliberately coordinated to reach.

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Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Daniel Vidal, head chef of Baldío, LATAM's first zero-waste restaurant, joined Koen in the kitchen in Mexico City to talk about what it actually takes to make radical food accessible to the people it was always meant for. When Baldío won a Green Michelin Star, Daniel didn't think to take his mother there for her birthday as the restaurant back then could win over critics but not his own community.

Daniel walks through how Baldío rebuilt its menu from the ground up shifting from a Nordic-inflected à la carte that impressed visiting chefs to a tasting menu grounded in tamales, tacos, and corn in every single dish. He explains why familiarity is the gateway drug for getting locals to try ant eggs, grasshoppers, and beef treated with koji to mimic the texture Mexicans already know from corn-fed imports. Daniel unpacks the 60-ingredient mole built almost entirely from kitchen waste — banana peel tart trimmings, English sauce offcuts, insect protein — as both a culinary feat and a zero-waste accounting exercise.

This is the third episode of a three conversations series recorded on location at Baldío, in Mexico City: farm, fermentation lab, kitchen. 

More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
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Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

As a child in Nairobi, Benedetta Kyengo spent holidays climbing trees and eating mangoes and papayas at her grandmother's food forest in eastern Kenya. Eight years later, every tree was gone, replaced by maize and beans, and her grandmother, who used to send food to the city, was depending on money sent from it. That reversal, from abundance to dependency in a single generation, is the wound this episode is about healing.
Benedetta, founder of Feedback to the Future and a practitioner of syntropic agroforestry in Kenya's semi-arid east, bought five acres of severely degraded land in 2020 and spent the next four years turning it into a 100-species food forest. She describes how terrible droughts almost forced her to quit, why she teaches farmers to be "greedy with water", stealing runoff from neighbours' plots and slowing every drop into the soil, and how training hundreds of farmers across 300 acres has measurably changed local rainfall patterns. She also explains how she plans to make this food accessible not to wealthy Nairobi consumers, but to the slum communities she grew up in: by stripping input costs to near zero, saving indigenous seeds, and packaging in the small quantities the slum economy actually runs on. For anyone asking whether regenerative agriculture can work in brittle, semi-arid landscapes and at a price point that serves ordinary people, this episode is a field report from someone already doing it.

More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Thank you to our Field Builders Circle for supporting us. Learn more here
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
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Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
=======
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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!

Fermentation is the oldest food technology on earth. It happens in our guts, in the soil, in every cup of coffee and most restaurants still throw the juiced lime away. At Baldío, Mexico City's zero-waste restaurant, Chris Locke has built an entire philosophy around that lime: a Korean-style raw syrup, a lacto-fermented powder for seasoning, a tapache, and finally a koji-based shoyu. Four products, zero waste, from something already used. 
In this conversation, recorded inside Baldío's production warehouse in Mexico City, Chris unpacks the three real drivers of fermentation — flavour, health, and waste reduction — and why most kitchens only chase one. He explains why the menu at Baldío functions like an ecosystem, where removing one dish breaks six others, why consistency is the wrong obsession for any restaurant working with small regenerative farms, and how 200 litres of surplus corn vinegar a week is pushing the project toward a retail product line. 
A UK chef who built his fermentation practice in Toronto and a circular innovation kitchen in Melbourne before arriving in Mexico City and waited four months for a job that didn't yet exist, Chris brings a rare cross-cultural precision to a practice most people still associate only with natural wine. Fermentation as a tool for closing loops, building shelf-stable products, and making the economics of zero-waste food actually work.

More about this episode.
Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? Send us a message!
Find out more about our Generation-Re investment syndicate:
https://gen-re.land/
Support the show
=======
In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
👩🏻‍💻 VISIT OUR WEBSITE 
📚 JOIN OUR VIDEO COURSE 
💪🏻 SUPPORT OUR WORK
Join Gumroad
Share it
Give a 5-star rating
Buy us a coffee… or a meal! 
=======
🎙 YouTube channel
🔗 Linkedin
📸 Instagram
Join our newsletter!
=======
The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed financial advisor or investment professional before making any financial decisions.
Feedback, ideas, suggestions? Get in touch!